[the ring]

Last year, Dad took a business trip to Malaysia. While he was walking through a parking deck after a conference, he and several business associates were robbed at gunpoint. Thankfully, Dad had left his second cell phone and wallet in his other pants; he's not the neatest eater and had spilled something on his pants. In a hurry he'd run back to the room and changed pants so as not to be late to the next conference session. No one was harmed, but the robbers did take Dad's wedding ring.

This Christmas Mom decided to surprise Dad by getting him a new wedding ring. While out finishing up some Christmas shopping, we popped into a Zale's at the mall. Mom found a ring that looked shockingly similar to Dad's original ring (purchased back in the mid-80's).

Every year, Mom puts all her $1 bills in jars and saves them. Come December, Kara, Mom and I split the cash and get new outfits for Christmas Eve mass. This year, Kara and I agreed to allow Mom to use our Christmas suit money to get Dad a new ring. Between the Christmas suit money and the earnings from Mom's last garage sale, we had more than enough to get the ring. 

Unfortunately, the money was at home. Throughout dinner, Mom kept saying that she wanted to go get Dad's ring. So that's exactly what we did.

But first we had to take care of something. 

You see, the money was all in $1 bills. And the bank was closed. So I came up with an idea: why don't we deposit all of the singles in the ATM and pull out $20's? We didn't want Dad to see the payment to Zale's come out of my parents' joint account so we had to do the transaction in cash. 

Singles in hand, we drove to an ATM. As we found out, you could only deposit 40 bills per transaction. So I divided the singles into $40 piles and fed them to Mom. We hurriedly fed the bills into the machine, which would occasionally reject a few bills. Sometimes Mom couldn't catch the bills and they'd fall to the ground, causing Mom to shriek "GET IT GET IT GET IT!!" One time she flung the stack of singles at me when a bill fluttered to the ground outside the car. I ran around the car, got the escapee, and climbed back in. 

Eventually a line developed behind us so we moved over to the walk-up ATM. I was charged with making sure no boogey men got Mom while she was finishing the transaction. Having witnessed someone being mugged two years ago, I was a bit jumpy. I rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Naturally, Mom attempted to yell something at me and when I stared blankly back at her, she assumed I had gone daffy. The truth was that I couldn't hear her and can't read lips to save my life. 

At one point in time, a car pulled in behind us and shut off its lights, both interior & exterior. I willed Mom to hurry up. Thankfully she did and we were soon on our way to the mall.

We scrambled to Zale's, money tucked in Mom's wallet. Unfortunately, when we got there we found out that the protection plan that would allow us to replace and resize the ring was an additional $70. We had only pulled enough out for the ring & tax. So we told the sales associate we'd be right back and scuttled down to the ATM in the food court. With an additional $80 in hand, we finally had the right amount and were able to get the ring.  Exhausted, we returned home for some wine.

Needless to say, Dad was thrilled and immediately popped the ring on.